By Rob Patrick

LITTLE ROCK — The Bryant Lady Hornets’ seniors just know how to win.

Though they trailed the Little Rock Central Lady Tigers for most of their 7A-Central Conference game at the sweat box also known as the Tiger Den, the Lady Hornets found a way to extract a 47-42 win. The fact that they held the Lady Tigers to just 2 points over the final six minutes of the game was integral.

“I felt like, through the whole course of the game, they never looked like they expected anything other than we were going to win,” Bryant head coach Blake Condley said of his players. “They were the same start to finish, no panic, no frustrations. We just kept doing what we’ve been doing.

“Central didn’t give us anything tonight,” he noted. “We had to work and earn it. Central played real hard. They were aggressive. I thought they did a lot of good things. We just had to fight through that in order to be able to win.”

As a result of the victory, the Lady Hornets will be the No. 2 seed from the league to the Class 7A State Tournament in Van Buren. They’ve earned a first-round bye and they won’t run into the unbeaten Central champs from North Little Rock until the finals, if they can get there.

By Rob Patrick

LITTLE ROCK — In the end, when you’ve given the last ounce of effort one last time, it seems like the whole season’s worth of weariness descends on you.

Bone tired.

The end is bittersweet.

Bitter because there will be no more drives to the rack, no more swishing 3-balls from the corner, no more steals and coast-to-coast sprints, no more of that sweet anticipation before a game, no more “thrill of victory.”

Sweet because there will be no more defenders pounding you as you try to dribble up the floor, no more cuts and scratches, no more bruises, no more conditioning drills at practice, and no more “agony of defeat.”

The Bryant Hornets battled to the very end. Even when their hopes of going to the State tournament were dashed, they continued to bring it. But, the results didn’t change. In their final game of the season on Friday night at the sauna otherwise known as the Tiger Den at Little Rock Central, they were close. The Tigers held on, however, for a 68-57 win.

By Rob Patrick

Saying that his team is further along at this point than it was last year, Bryant head baseball coach Kirk Bock sends his defending 7A-Central Conference champion Hornets to the field for a benefit game against the Pine Bluff Zebras on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 5 p.m.

The Hornets, coming off a 22-8 season that surprised some, welcome back all but three starters from last year’s team. Of course, those three starters — Tyler Sawyer, Kaleb Jobe and Justin Blankenship — all signed to play college ball. They were the team’s top three in runs batted in and included the team leader in wins on the mound (Sawyer) and saves (Jobe).

“Those were three key people,” Bock allowed, “but we’ve got more depth on the mound and, this year, we actually have people competing for positions in the infield. And they’re competing hard and that’s good. So, we’re going to have some choices where last year, we were limited a little bit. It’s going to be fun.”

 By Rob Patrick

It somehow seems appropriate that tonight when the Little Rock Central Tigers play the Bryant Hornets at Bryant Stadium, they’ll play old-school: A little grass, a little dirt, a little mud.

The game marks the end of the regular season for both teams but the Hornets will be playing on next week at home in the first round of the Class 7A State playoffs.

The Tigers, meanwhile, will pack the pads away and, more than that, their head coach Bernie Cox will hang up his whistle after 44 yards in the biz. Back in 1965, every game was played on grass, dirt and mud.

Cox has earned his retirement. As the head coach at Central since 1975, he’s led the Tigers to seven State championships including back-to-back crowns as recently as 2003-2004, to go with 17 conference titles and 20 playoff appearances.

But those heady days are past. Tonight, the Tigers will be trying to avoid a second consecutive 0-10 season and a 21-game losing streak.

By Rob Patrick

Both the Bryant Hornets and the North Little Rock Charging Wildcats will host a game in the Class 7A playoffs. The question is, which one will host a first-round game on Friday, Nov. 13, and which will have a bye that weekend and open at home on Friday, Nov. 20.

Oh, and the winner of their game tonight at North Little Rock will probably finish the regular season with at least a share of the 7A-Central Conference championship too.

Six teams from the Central (and the 7A-West) advance to the playoffs but the top two teams from both leagues earn byes in the first round while seeds three and four host seeds six and five, respectively, to get the playoffs started.

The Hornets and the Charging Wildcats are two of four teams going into tonight’s play, tied for the lead in the Central at 4-1.

Cabot and Russellville, the other two teams, take on second-division teams this week but finish against each other next Thursday when Bryant and North Little Rock finish against two teams at or near the bottom of the league.

So, it figures that the winner of tonight’s Bryant-North Little Rock game and Thursday’s Cabot-Russellville game will share the title and earn the byes.

By Rob Patrick

The switch, the surprise, the lesson learned, the secret and the magic shoes.

First, the secret:

Way back in the day, before the Bryant Hornets started winning regularly in football, they had a young head coach named David Jordan. Under his tutelage, the Hornets ran an old-style offense called the dead-T. And among the coaches on campus back then, there were three — Paul Calley, Steve Griffith and Brad Stroud — who are still around today.

You want to know why no one stops the Cabot Panthers’ dead-T like the Bryant Hornets? Why, in the four years that the Hornets have been playing against the Panthers in the 7A-Central Conference, Cabot has only had one running back eclipse 100 yards in a game? (Jordan Carlisle in 2007 got 108 but 75 of that came on one play.)

By Rob Patrick

Bryant Hornets senior quarterback Jimi Easterling was looking forward to getting to play against the Cabot Panthers. Sure, he knows what kind of challenge it would be. After all, the Panthers are unbeaten this season and ranked as high as No. 1 in the state by some. They lead the 7A-Central Conference with a 4-0 mark and the Hornets, at 3-1, have a chance to pull into a first-place tie with a win.

It’s just that Easterling didn’t get to play much against them last season. He started the game and, on the Hornets’ opening drive, he'd led his team on a march from its own 20 to a first-and-goal at the Cabot 8. On second and goal, Easterling suffered a leg injury that not only kept him out of the rest of the game but ended his season.

The Hornets never got that close to the goal line again and Cabot went on to win 14-0.

Easterling spent long hours rehabbing and has come back this season with a fine effort, completing 61 of 104 passes (57 percent) for 844 yards and 10 touchdowns. He’s also netted 69 yards rushing on 24 carries.

And he’s been looking forward to trying it again against Cabot.

But it won’t happen.

By Rob Patrick

NORTH LITTLE ROCK — If this was it; if the Bryant Lady Hornets’ hopes of reaching the Class 7A State Tournament in Van Buren ended on Tuesday, Oct. 20, with a 3-0 loss at North Little Rock; and, if this season begins a new era of success for the Lady Hornets program, the senior class of 2009 will at least be able to look back and say, “We were there. We helped turn it around.”

It won’t be certain until the coaches get together on Wednesday, Oct. 21, to compare scores but with their 11-25, 15-25, 14-25 loss at North Little Rock coupled with Cabot’s 3-1 win over Van Buren, the Lady Hornets may well have been knocked out of a State big despite being tied with Cabot for the sixth spot with a 6-8 league mark.

As best as can be determined, that’s the best conference record by a Bryant team this decade.

By Rob Patrick

CONWAY — Well, it looks like the Bryant Hornets will be contending for a conference championship after all.

And the next two weeks will be as much about that as they are about where they’ll be seeded for the Class 7A State playoffs.

That’s because the Hornets bounced back from their first loss of the season with a dominating first half against the Conway Wampus Cats on Friday, Oct. 16. And the 31-point halftime lead wound up a 31-14 victory that sets up a first-place showdown in the 7A-Central Conference when the unbeaten Cabot Panthers visit Bryant on Friday, Oct. 23.

But for the 14-3 loss in the mud at Bryant Stadium the previous week against Russellville, it would be a battle of unbeatens.

By Rob Patrick

So, will the Bryant Hornets be battling Cabot, North Little Rock and Russellville for a 7A-Central Conference championship down the stretch or will they be battling Conway and Little Rock Catholic and a couple of the teams in that first group for playoff seeding?

Tonight’s game at Conway will go a long way to determining Bryant’s fate in that regard.

If they beat Conway, they’ll go into games against Cabot and North Little Rock with a chance to lay claim to a title. But a loss to the Wampus Cats and the margin for error the next two weeks would be nil.

(League-leading Cabot (3-0), for example, has only two real tests left, at Bryant on Oct. 23, and at Russellville on Nov. 5. Same for North Little Rock with Bryant on Oct. 30 and Catholic tonight.)

And the Hornets have had their struggles in Faulkner County. In fact, their 17-6 in 2007 was just their second at Conway. The other was in 1999. Bryant lost their 27-22 in 2005 and 37-24 in 2003.